The Globe and Mail (Saturday January 7th) featured the story of one person who has been a member of Pathways Information Centre, Perry Joyce. Perry’s own story is similar to many; he lost his job, migrated to Vancouver and found himself in the inner-city. Finding work proved difficult. And so did accessing community services, housing, and building a network of friends, until he found Pathways.
What is not stated directly enough, is that the number of people in the inner-city struggling to ‘attach to the workforce’ is huge. And the government’s plan for employment services does not serve the population well.
10,000 people live in ‘low income households’ in the DTES. Pathways, a low-barrier access point and referral centre, registers @3,000 new members each year. Pathways has, for 9 years, worked to address the needs of the DTES by connecting people to community services when they need them. Daily 200-250 people stop in to use the computers, talk to counselors. The Ministry of Social Development’s new streamlined Employment Service Centre is supposed to replace Pathways and several other existing services on April 1, 2012. The new proposed Employment Service Centre, for the much larger ‘catchment area’ (Nanaimo to Richards), anticipates serving only 500 high needs job seekers annually.
Put simply, where do the other unemployed and under-employed people in the DTES go?
